i'm glad i checked out what tricky's been up to over the last 20 years before blindly going.

i don't expect that i'd enjoy this concert.

and, that would make crossing the border a non-issue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/04/19/schumer-backs-effort-to-decriminalize-marijuana/?noredirect=on

i think that when these christian groups start organizing more directly and more prominently with muslim groups - and this common judaic front against secular liberalism is coming soon to a jurisdiction near you  - it's going to potentially be a final push factor for a lot of these "cultural christians" that are christians-in-name-only, sort of thing.

it's going to make religion seem more real and more distant at the same time.

if catholics took their religion as seriously as muslims, they'd be just as scary.

and, we're not that historically removed from a time when they did...

...but, right now, they just don't. and it's disingenuous to suggest they do.

evangelicals, on the other hand, are comparably creepy. but, we don't have a lot of those around here.

i'm going to guess it's a sears poncho, for sure.

but, see, this is the difference between catholics and muslims.

there's another example at the halton school board in toronto, where the board had to change it's pro-life policy due to pressure from students and teachers. that's actually encouraging. but, you get the opposite from muslims: they're constantly pushing their bureaucrats to be more fundamentalist.

catholic students protest against bureaucrats trying to restrict access to sex-ed; muslim students protest against the bureaucrats not taking a strong enough stand against it.

i mean, don't misunderstand me: i think we should get rid of the catholic school board. but, the reality is that it's own students seem to agree with me.

there's not a lot of difference, at the pulpit. but, there's huge differences in the congregation - and it's the congregation that's the scary part.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2018/05/01/divine-child-prom-modesty-ponchos/570383002/

he hasn't spent much time in michigan bars, clearly.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/2018/05/02/marijuana-spiked-beer-would-banned-under-senate-bill/572957002/

*shrug*.

i'm really expecting you to need a card by the end of this process.

....which is going to be a legal nightmare for everybody.

this is bullshit, it's the treaties. we would have done this fifty years ago, but the treaties exist. and, we're really handcuffed by them.

we're going to need a president to open up the treaties before we can do this rationally.

in the mean time, i'm really more interested in what michigan is doing, anyways.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/05/01/marijuana-legalization-should-be-put-off-until-first-nations-tax-sharing-worked-out-senate-committee.html

on marijuana, it's actually the provincial regulations that i think are lacking. it's usually the other way around...

but, that new lease requirement to force tenants & landlords to come to terms on smoking is arguably a good step forward, even if it leads to a lot of people moving.

it's been very hard to enforce non-smoking policies in ontario. it's ultimately a judicial issue.

i want the stuff legal, i just want to retain control over my own interaction with it.

in my circumstance, my issue is with a "medical" user and recreational laws don't have anything to do with the problem, or anything to do with a solution. this woman should be living in a standalone dwelling, not an apartment complex; there's really no way to accommodate her. but there's no way to throw her out, either.

lol.

blame the indians.

see, if this was harper we'd all understand this as oil politics - divide & conquer. sadly, it doesn't seem like that's so far off the mark here, either.

there is no legal requirement to consult with first nations over marijuana laws, and not much way to make sense of the report; this should be understood as political, rather than legal.

and, we should all be disappointed if trudeau goes along with what is really a smear job, in order to make his pipeline opponents look bad in the eyes of average consumers.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/trudeau-won-t-say-whether-liberals-will-delay-cannabis-legalization-1.3911891

i did a lot of walking in the sun on monday, but i got plenty of sleep monday night and tuesday morning.

that said, i didn't sleep much on the weekend, either.

...and, i actually slept all day.

i clearly needed it; i was exhausted for some reason.

i don't know why.

i still don't smell drugs in here, and i'm happy about the temperature.

i guess it's possible that my cycle just got out of sync. the fact is that i usually sleep in the afternoon.

but, it doesn't explain the red eyes when i got up to urinate this morning.

i should be awake all night, tonight. we'll see what it smells like.

it's weird.

i feel hungover.

i haven't had a drink, a toke or a cigarette since april 13th, at the last concert i went to. it's been second-hand smoke since.

i think i slept through a session, but i can't remember it, so how can i react?

but i'm just dead fucking tired.

i think i should have gotten most of the way through january yesterday, so i'm ok with carrying forward.

i'm going to eat, and then focus on cleaning in the other room, regardless of the situation. hopefully that wakes me up.

we're getting rain tonight and i'm excited about it. this might be my song this summer...

i'm not sure that she's even home.

tonight is weird, and not useful.

the smell is faint; it could be coming from anywhere, very much unlike the nights where it's pluming in from one direction.

i feel stoned. but, i'm also dehydrated and tired, and i'm having difficulty smelling anything at all.

i should be a little tired, but not like this.

so, i can feel the effects of the drug, but i can barely smell it, i can barely smell anything, and i'm not sure where it's coming from.

i might just be tired and dehydrated. which is kind of the same thing as being stoned, right?

i passed out a few hours ago. i'm just going to drink water and get some rest.

well...

i'm not certain it's coming from downstairs.

ugh.

she appears to be smoking inside tonight.

i'm going to have to start looking for something tomorrow.

i mean, i guess i didn't...

i was calling her, trying to tell her i didn't want to have sex with her. i guess that's not the most exciting thing to hear from an ex you still have feelings for, is it? and, i guess you wouldn't want other people thinking that either, would you?

it might have been kind of painful.

i didn't grasp that at all; i was just trying to win a friend back.

but, there was some kind of breaking point, because the girl i dated would have shrugged that off. that breaking point must have been more along the lines of a realization that i wasn't going to be the dude she imagined i would, after all. faced with that resignation, whatever mutual stringing along that was happening had to end...

what i started to figure out as the saga unfolded was that the reason she was angry with me was that i just wanted to be friends.

she didn't like being friendzoned, basically, and rejected me, instead - if i wasn't going to be a man, she didn't have time for me.

meaning, the whole rejecting me thing was some kind of reverse psychology, because she herself felt rejected by my decision to go back on hormones.

and, what that exposed was that she was holding on to feelings for me the whole time, when i thought we were just friends.

again: i'm not going to pretend that this was totally unrealized, or even completely unreciprocated. i had some idea. but, i'm still kind of surprised by the fact that she wouldn't let it blow over.

i'm weird in a different way; i've never been sexually rejected, because i've never asked anybody for sex.

really.

never.

well, i guess i was rejected once, but that's even weirder, because i got rejected without asking. see, she thought i was calling her for sex, when i actually wasn't - and that's an exceedingly awkward argument, because you have to win it. you can't let her walk away thinking you're trying to have sex with her. you have to convince her you're not. so, i kept calling her over and over trying to convince her i wasn't interested in sex, and she just kept thinking i was more and more interested in it because i kept calling.

the frustration on my end of this was really complicated by the fact that this wasn't a casual ex; we dated for several years and lived together for most of those years, and then remained friends for years after. we hung out as friends after we broke up, so the call wasn't really weird at all. she shouldn't have thought this; she should have known better. so, i wasn't just trying to convince an ex i wasn't trying to sleep with her, i was trying to convince a friend that i valued her.

and, i did.

but, you know - somebody gets their mind made up and it doesn't matter what you tell them.

kind of heartbreaking.

the weirdest thing is that she spent years convinced i was gay, then all of a sudden totally flipped on it, and flipped on it right when i went back on hormones. see, the reason i started calling right at that point was that i was going back on hormones. like, i wanted to go shopping. that's what we did when we met, and what i missed and wanted back: a female-female friendship, not a sexual relationship. and, she randomly accuses me of trying to sleep with her and then makes a big deal out of turning me down, when i never asked her in the first place.

but, other than that weird misunderstanding (which was being driven by something else that i never quite figured out...), i've actually honestly never been sexually rejected - and it's because i've never made any sexual advances.

like, ever.

i'm the one doing all the rejecting...

there was one time i showed up at this ex' place on a dinner request (she called me and asked me over for dinner), and walked into a request for a threesome, which i turned down. i can barely handle monogamy, i'm way too shy for casual sex with a stranger and an ex like that. she's not, though; she never understood that about me, or she never understood why i seemed so shy. in hindsight, i think that was probably at the heart of it.

but, i guess i was naive about it; i thought she was really getting the wrong message. well, i kind of knew that the actual truth was the other way around. but, if you're naive and you think she really thinks that, you have to keep trying to smooth it over. and, what rule are you breaking by calling a friend to try and convince them that you don't want to have sex with them?

it didn't work out in the end. but, in hindsight, she can't have still thought i was trying to sleep with her by the end, after i'd explained to her a dozen times that i wasn't.

that's my one story of sexual rejection.

because i've honestly never felt the urge to even try.

i don't really know anything about this, and it's not something i'm much interested in, but i just want to point out that the idea that this is some kind of consequence of the internet is ridiculous.

history is full of episodes of mass rape, and some of these episodes have dramatically altered the genetic make-up in very large regions of the world. the mongol expansion was particularly brutal. roman civilization traced it's founding to one such event, and while it may have been somewhat mythological, the broad pattern is observed through virtually all mass migration events from the steppes to the coasts and it's hard to believe that the roman invasion of italy would have been any different.

the reason that rape is so hard to defeat is precisely because it is so embedded within who we are.

to an extent, men have one task of procreation; women have the resulting task of finding the right sperm and rejecting insufficient mates. it is imperative, for the health of the genome, that women be allowed to discriminate. and, yes, this is crude; as a voluntary celibate, i don't live in this world and am the perfect example of how it's possible to get past it. but, the base genetic reality is a brutal arms race.

i have to wonder what extent that the cultural rejection of homosexuality plays into this. i suspect it's substantive, as nurturing relationships between these 'incels' is probably the best way out of this problem.

the truth is that i've barely heard any prince.

a little. enough to conclude it's not my thing...and not much more.

i'm not quite that old, and it was never in the list of seminal influences of anything i really liked. i think reznor is probably the closest thing to a prince fan in my own list of influences.

so, i don't talk much about prince.

because i'm not much of a fan.

i did have a michael jackson phase when i was very young.

actually, this is going to get weird, because i'm going to be reposting reposts.

for example, i reposted the following posts from 2012 in 2016: 

jan 14, 2016

i'm sorting through old posts, trying to shut down my facebook politics page from 2012. it's interesting to read certain things.

16 October 2012

so, it's mcguinty v. trudeau.

there's the challenger that people were expecting. i had john manley at the top of the list, but mcguinty was never far down; despite what he's said about completing his third term, that he would run for the liberal leadership when the opportunity is right has been obvious for a while now. it's also obvious that he's doing this now precisely because he's concerned that if trudeau gets in then he'll be there for the next thirty years.

this is actually an interesting race, because it's likely going to determine if the liberals are going to present a third centre-right option or swing out to the left of the ndp. mcguinty will not be substantially different from harper or mulcair, but trudeau just might be.

28 September 2012

several years ago, before he even ran for mp, i remember seeing some old videos of justin trudeau floating around on youtube. he was doing some kind of campus speaking tour, i think some time in the late 90s. the topic was the decline of western civilization, and how young people growing up in canada need to prepare themselves for a future where the nexus of global power, wealth and influence resides in asia, rather than in america – and the consequences of such a shift. these videos no longer appear to be available on youtube, but i'm sure they'll surface over the course of the next few months as conservative attack ad fodder.

of course, it wasn't the first time i'd heard somebody say something like that, but coming from such a source (while he was not in the public eye at the time, he was still the oldest and most visible son of what amounts to canada's version of thomas jefferson), it was rather shocking. such statements would threaten to shatter the delusions that continue to be held by much of canada's middle class.

"civilizations rise and fall.".

he was elected as an mp not long after i saw those videos. over the last few years, he's played the media fairly well. his supposedly controversial statements have in fact been widely popular, and when pushed his responses have been both surprisingly phrased to appeal to an extremely socially liberal audience as well as surprisingly nuanced.

the point i'm getting to is that i think that baby trudeau is a bigger wild card than many observers will recognize on first glance because he has the potential to eat back into the ndp; when contrasted against mulcair's cold, business-person exterior the flippant trudeau is going to come off very, very well with younger voters. the newspapers are going to write him off as a liberal aristocrat, being floated by the party leadership. it remains to see if this is going to be the case or not. however, he really hasn't seriously defined his political stances yet, so it's going to be hard to determine if the commentary is accurate or sensational on a wide variety of topics. however, this is where the next few months of campaigning for the liberal leadership are going to be very interesting - he's going to have to finally do precisely that. judging from those clips i saw on that campus tour, as well as the select commentary he's provided, i think there may be more of interest in his views than one might expect.....

there have been multiple polls suggesting that if an election were to be held tomorrow and baby trudeau were to be the liberal party candidate then we'd be back at a liberal majority. the liberal party may be currently broken, but it's still the most successful democratic political apparatus (measured in terms of political wins) that's ever existed, anywhere. as i've said repeatedly: it's the fucking british liberal party. it's not going to pass up on that kind of opportunity.

the question is whether or not it realizes that trudeau's popularity is due partly to his name and partly to his attitude, the precise attitude that the press is going to deride him for. given that we're talking about the liberal party, and it's long history of charismatic leaders, i'm sure it does.

a couple of key policy differences, accompanied with the ndp's move to the right, could position the liberals to their left. judging from what i've heard so far from baby trudeau, i think that's where his mind just might be.

so, this is going to get interesting.

so, the next period is from jan 10th to june 19th, when the music blog reappears, and it's about 500 pages, mostly from the primary phase of the election.

i found the primaries more interesting than the general; i didn't tune out entirely after bernie lost, but i never really saw trump as substantively different than clinton, or clinton as worth supporting for any other reason than to beat trump, so i more or less gave up on the election having an acceptable outcome when the candidates were announced.

i suspect a lot of americans had that feeling, too - and it's probably why trump won.

we'll see in the end if i want to carry through with this or not, but i should at least get a skeleton up.

remember that the main focus is the master list for the aleph discs.

you're supposed to think i'm wrong; that's how this works - if what i was saying was conventional, i wouldn't be interesting.

and, i might be wrong. sure.

we'll find out.

but, i'm used to being written off; don't think that's going to phase me.

please recognize that the idea is that you're supposed to follow the argument and decide what you think, not take me on authority. i'm not producing decrees, here. and i'm not looking for mindless followers.

the bay windows may indeed save the day.

let me try and get some work done.

great.

now, this smokestack next door has her friends over. maybe we've found the source of the windsor hum?

i'm considering lobbing al bundy jokes out the window.

ladies: i know grazing season is starting, but you seem to be lost; the grass is over there.

well...

there's currently not any smoke coming up from downstairs.

the woman next door is, however, chain smoking outside my window.

she appears to have been drunk before noon - cigarettes and vodka, the breakfast of champions.

this place is full of real winners.

so, i'm going to have to wait a few hours to clean up the bedroom. i've cleaned up the kitchen.

i want to start looking for something, but i'm going to give the situation one more chance. i could still cancel the application, remember.

and, i think i need to know how they're going to be admitting new tenants. are they going to make new tenants sign a no smoking clause? i didn't know this was coming, and it might be what she was talking about; while there is not a new law banning smokers, she may have been referring to the company's new lease policy when she was talking about a "law banning smoking inside" and how "existing tenants are grandfathered". i mean, she sounded like she was just full of shit. but, i can at least put together a broken thought, now. if so, i like my chances on this space becoming more habitable. because this is also a screen - smokers are bad tenants, all around. they're bad people, broadly speaking. a no smoking policy is going to mean a safer building, all around.

i would expect that rents in non-smoking buildings will be higher than rents in smoking buildings.

and, that smoking buildings are going to be horrifically disgusting carcinogenic tinder boxes....

we'll have to see how the courts interpret this, but the intent seems to be to make it easier for the landlord to evict smokers.

the residential tenancies act says nothing about smoke, and this observation is actually explicitly stated in the new lease. but, by including a smoking section in the lease, the landlord can conceivably remove a tenant for breaching the lease.

further, the smoking section is explicitly treated differently than the pets section; prohibition against pets is explicitly stated as void.

so, the government appears to be telling the courts that landlords have the right to discriminate on these grounds - and that is the appropriate legal language. we'll see what the courts say.

but, i don't expect that this new lease process will withhold a legal challenge - i expect that the court will strike down the smoking provision as overly broad.

unfortunately.

www.forms.ssb.gov.on.ca/mbs/ssb/forms/ssbforms.nsf/GetFileAttach/047-2229E~2/$File/2229E(Static).pdf

well, she's right.

i'm not sure how much of a ballot issue it is, though.

it might help her keep some of those seats in toronto - but they probably weren't going to swing, anyways.

https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2018/05/01/wynne-denounces-fords-plan-to-develop-greenbelt-as-wrong-on-so-many-levels.html

i needed to catch up on some sleep. i'm awake now....

it actually seems pleasant in here, right now.

you don't learn a lot from a physical. my blood pressure is 110/70, after a brisk walk on a nice day, so that's in a healthy range. i'll get my blood work done at the end of the week and go back mid-month.

he's never heard of estradiol hemihydrate and can't comment on the chemical differences. he'd refer me to the specialist in town, but the specialist in town won't talk to me, because he doesn't think i'm effeminate enough. *shrug*.

i'm not going to switch meds without a good talk with somebody. i might call the specialist myself.

i got my puffer refilled...

the rest of the day was spent grocery shopping, and i got a lot of the month's purchasing done, as lots of things were on sale. but, i can't find any chocolate soy.

i crashed in the evening and again overnight. i wanted to clean in here this morning but will do it today, instead.

i also woke up to a familiar annoyance: an air conditioner.

:(.

i don't understand why people don't enjoy the heat. we're tropical animals. we're supposed to like it when it's 30 degrees out.

right now, i'm in the frustrating scenario of having to deal with smokers outside and an a/c downstairs, and i don't know what is going to be worse. am i going to want to keep the windows closed because of the smokers, or open them because of the a/c?

this is such a disgusting, saddening scenario. and, again: i like the space, but the problem is the people around me.

it would be nice if i could just open the window - a/c or not - to let the fresh air in. you'd think that's a pretty basic human request. alas...

at least i have the bay windows. i'm hoping the temperature comes up nicely due to the sunlight through the glass fairly soon.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-social-conservatives-savour-victory-thank-immigrants/

it's less that ford's strategy is bad, and more that it's a lot more forward thinking than his detractors might imagine and that it actually needs more time than this to unravel.

ford might not win this election, or stick around to fight the next one. but, he might be laying the groundwork for the next fifty years of politics in the province. and, he might relegate the liberal party of ontario to the kind of upper class ivory tower that the lib dems live in, in the process.

the liberals really do need those immigrant votes. but, the immigrants are conservatives. #. 

...which isn't to give him too much credit: he's an effect and not a cause. but, if he can convincingly swing all these conservative immigrants, they might be very hard to swing back.

and, we might have little choice but to support the ndp to hold off the conservatives, everywhere outside of that ivory tower.

mild correction: it seems like what i was imagining already happened.

my hypothetical riding ceased to exist a cycle or two ago. the ndp have already won all of those ridings, and the liberals are already polling third in a lot of places.

that means that a tory swing of this nature may have the potential of being absolutely trivial. or, it could let horwath come up the middle in certain places.

my riding should be being targetted by ford. it has a large conservative muslim minority that has succeeded in electing a right-wing lebanese mayor, amongst other things. the conservatives are running a right-wing muslim in the riding that is no doubt opposed to teaching sex ed. so, this is the kind of audience that ford's message is designed for.


the riding was held by liberals for years, until the ndp finally broke through; these were the results of the last election:

ndp - 41
liberals - 38
conservatives - 14

given that the ndp are holding steady, or even up, the conservatives would need an almost total collapse in liberal support to win this riding. they'd need more than ten points just to come in second.

but, there is some reason to think that they may, in fact, be running more than ten points up.

if the result of the election is this:

ndp - 39
conservatives - 35
liberals - 19

...then that ends up as a big boost in conservative support, on paper. but, the ndp hold the riding.

london north is another example where the liberals have already ceded ground over the last few cycles, but they still hold the seat. this is the result of the last election:

liberals - 36
ndp - 30
conservatives - 27

if the liberals lose ten points here, and 6 of it goes to ford, you end up with:

ndp - 34
conservatives - 33
liberals - 26

and, that is one of ford's better chances for a pick-up. even the numbers in brampton and etobicoke and mississauga, ford nation, are pretty daunting, for the conservatives - they need 15-20% swings, and are often in third place.

i had my numbers out of date. but, the idea stands: if you go through and look at the ridings one-by-one, it becomes clear that if this swing is localized amongst urban immigrants (ford's base.) *and* ndp support holds then the number of ridings where conservatives can win seats by attracting liberal voters is actually quite low.

so, even if the popular vote does shoot up, it might not lead to much of a substantive difference.

ford needs to hold that old tory demographic, and swing seats in the liberal fortress, if he wants to actually win. those are the seats the conservatives might actually flip. and, all evidence i've seen suggests that he's not doing well in this demographic of rich white liberals - or that he ever has done well with them.

it is possible that the tories could be running at 45% and not only lose but barely pick up a few seats. and it is possible that the ndp could even go down a few points and still win a dozen seats.

this is first past the past in a multi-party system.

but, as mentioned - i don't think the evidence that they're even running at 40% is really very strong.

given that my hypothetical riding looks like windsor or london or waterloo, it's entirely possible for the conservatives to be up by 5-10% in "southwestern ontario" and not actually win any seats - because they already have all the rural seats, and they'd need to be up by 15-20% to actually swing any urban seats.

these are rough numbers, but the point i'm making is accurate.

so, these regional polling categories have the potential to be deeply misleading.

we're dealing with small movements within low-balled margins of error here, but if i'm correct that the tory numbers are being inflated in the media due to unreported high levels of undecideds, then you would expect to see the conservative numbers fall over the next few weeks - and that would not mean that they're losing ground, or that the other parties are gaining, but just that the undecideds are slowly registering properly in the sample.

so, you should indeed expect the race to narrow; you shouldn't interpret that as the race changing.

i'm more interested in the following observations:

1) everybody is starting to run out of time, here.
2) when you see both parties inch up by about the same amount, it suggests a high potential for vote splitting.

as mentioned: ontario actually tends to split rather nicely. don't get complacent, but don't start freaking out yet, either. it's hard for conservatives to win here....

the conservatives dominate the rural areas, and the ndp & liberals have their own regions of strength, depending mostly on class demographics. there's not a lot of battlegrounds. so, the traditional fear of a split vote is actually rather minimal, here - i would suspect there's actually a larger swing between the ndp and conservatives than between the ndp and liberals in much of upper middle class fortress toronto, meaning that if the liberals lose these seats it's not going to be due to the split but due to rich liberals voting for ford, an unlikely scenario.

the situation is rather that ford's unusually strong appeal to recent immigrants is going to pull from both parties in areas where the conservatives aren't usually considered competitive - like here in windsor - thereby creating the appearance of a split. and, this could indeed no doubt be largely resolved by consensus candidates. but, it's not quite the same thing as we usually talk about.

further, the ndp are actually up relative to where they've been over most of the last twenty years. so, i suspect that a closer analysis of the data is going to mostly suggest a collapse in the multicultural component of the liberal vote in these urban ridings, with stasis or even gains for the ndp. so, you need to ask where the liberal vote is really coming from and really going. and, there are a few spots where this could even counter-intuitively help the ndp.

consider an urban riding where the last election had this result:

liberals: 38
ndp: 33
conservatives: 21
greens - 8

an eight point swing from the liberals to the conservatives in this riding, along with a two point swing from the liberals to the ndp, would have the following outcome:

ndp: 35
conservatives: 29
liberals: 28
greens: 8

(and the greens do in fact do that well in many urban ontario ridings at the provincial level)

an eight point swing in an urban space would be a huge accomplishment for the tories in ontario. but it wouldn't be enough. and, this is what the numbers aren't taking into account: the tories win seats in the sticks by huge margins, and are uncompetitive in the cities, so they need to make up a very large amount of ground in order to actually swing seats.

it doesn't seem likely that ford is going to swing 15-20% in urban ridings, especially not with goofy candidates, and he'd have to do it to win.

i would like to see more targetted data on exactly where these swings are happening; i'm assuming that the swing is mostly happening in urban ridings, and amongst recent immigrants, but this is a deduction based on what we know about the candidates, and not hard empirical data. if the swing is actually happening in more affluent neighbourhoods, then this could be a harder election. but, the liberals are apparently still ahead in toronto.

i'm still predicting a coalition government.

but i'm still pointing out that the data isn't so great.

see, this is more along the lines of what i want to hear - as opposed to these expensive money sinks to futilely treat drug addiction.

you will probably get cancer. and, you will probably die from it, too.

that's where the bulk of the money and research should be going.

https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2018/04/30/take-home-cancer-drugs-will-be-covered-under-ohip-if-new-democrats-win-the-june-7-election-andrea-horwath.html

ok.

i'm at the exit point i wanted, which is when i finished my first record and then quit smoking.

i don't get back to the music again until june. there will no doubt be some posts made - to the alter-reality, reviews, show nights - but the music vlog is actually pretty much done. like, it's filled in the way i wanted it to be, from 2013--->2016.

that leaves me with roughly 1000 word doc pages left to rebuild the rest of 2016 with, most of it for the politics site, and i'm questioning whether i want to do this now or not. i have to at least sort through it. but i may be a little but picky about what i'm posting to the politics site, leaving the full rebuild for later.

i don't know what to expect this morning. i'm going to hand this woman a check and a letter, and tell her that the tenant below me is completely ignoring the new non-smoking policy, and continuing to chain smoke marijuana inside - as expected. i shouldn't expect her to do anything about this. but, then, why did she go around and hand out these notices?

the reason she did this was that the tenant below me was complaining that it wasn't fair that everybody else was allowed to smoke and she wasn't - again, just total grade school reasoning. but, they wanted to appear fair. so, they put this rule in place. and, now she's the only one not following it.

if i was the owner, that would really piss me off - you put a policy in place to accommodate her, and she just spits in your face. that would tell me that she has no interest in working with management.

but, it's not clear what they can substantively do about it, due to the absurd laws in this province that make it nearly impossible to throw her out.

it's a really surreal situation. this nihilistic drug addict has got us all held hostage, and the law is designed to facilitate it.

but, i'm starting to recognize that my time here may not include any actual recording. and, if that is the case, i may just go ahead and rebuild.

if i can get through the next section quickly, the next thing to do is to start writing for the alter-reality: 2017 & the first half, now, of 2018. this will permanently close my first 15 releases, or so.

it's really, really, really disgusting.

45 minutes later, the smoke is still pluming.

i'm not joking.

it's like she's running a fog machine.

i was hoping to finish up to my first record tonight and then spend the morning cleaning myself up.

we'll see how much longer i can stay awake for.

it's a really visceral, burning hate.

i've never hated somebody as much as i hate this person.

again: the problem is not the drug. the problem is the user.

this woman should be put through a fucking meat grinder and fed to the homeless.

what a fucking useless waste of oxygen.

i'm stoned.

i'm going to fall asleep.....

the smoke in here is so thick that i can see it.

it's not one joint.

it's joint after joint after joint.

on a monday fucking morning.

pathetic.

it's been pluming smoke for 25 minutes.

i'd like to go down there and beat the fucking shit out of her right now, i really fucking would.

if you have to get stoned on monday fucking morning, if you're that goddamned fucking pathetic, why can't you transport your fat piece of fucking shit ass outside to do it?

it's monday morning.

i'm trying to work...

i have an appointment in a few hours.

most people have to go to work in the morning.

the last thing i want to be right now is stoned.

:(

like, i'm left here wondering if this fucking disgusting piece of shit is trying to get me stoned, and, if so why?

that is simply not one person smoking one joint.

that is a group of people smoking many joints.

this is so remarkably frustrating.

it's absolutely brutal, tonight.

we're going to court....

concerns about my door are subsiding, at least for the night.

"so why don't you just be an effiminate dude?"

well, to a certain extent, i guess i am, right?

at the end of the day, i don't care whether you want to call me a trans-female or a total fag. these are just labels. boxes. and, i don't really see why you'd treat me any differently if you thought i was merely a complete fag, rather than a woman.

so, you can ask me: what's the difference?

well, i dunno. you're the one that's insisting on it, not me.

the thing is that there wasn't another option: all of the parties supported the pipelines.

so, if you were standing on the environmental left, you found yourself forced to choose between an ndp that wanted to ramp up production to tax the hell out of it (ala rachel notley, who isn't even actually taxing it...), and a liberal party that was making promises about converting infrastructure.

don't misunderstand anything i said: the liberals sounded awful. and, i told you that at the time. i told you we were going to have to fight these pipelines in court, and on the ground, if they won. and, i was right.

but, they are actually taking baby steps towards transition, as well - steps that there is really no evidence that thomas mulcair had any intent of taking. we'll see in a few months if they've made any concrete steps towards reducing emissions or not.

it's cynical, perhaps. but, the reality does remain that the atmosphere isn't picky about where reductions come from. so long as a market exists, it's naive to expect our political leaders to oppose extraction - that would be a hippie position that ignores the systemic realities of capitalism, and the inherent nature of canada as a colonial state. change of this nature will never come by swapping figureheads, it has to be more profound than that.

the best we could ever do was fight this in court, and hope the right hand loses track of what the left hand is really up to, in the zeal to push the shit through.

it's the nature of a lesser evil calculation. and, the bastards can do it, when there's not an actual good option.

https://ipolitics.ca/2018/04/28/881947/

there's a saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.

it's just a question of understanding your model well enough to be able to explain it's flaws. no model is magic; it's not an oracle.

and, let me tell you: if they survive the encounter, they won't be living here much longer. that's grounds for immediate eviction.

you can't quantify stupidity. and, we know these people are stupid...i'm just hoping they're not too drunk and/or tweaked out...

you don't want to be in a room alone with me when i'm feeling threatened, because i will lash out like an angry animal.

so, i'm half expecting these idiots to do something stupid tonight.

let it be written here that i might have overheard a threat to knock the door down.

see, the thing is that i'm not sure what i heard, and i didn't see anybody say it. if i had, i'd be contacting the police.

i have no patience for macho bullshit, and i don't suffer stupidity at all.

but, let it be known that i am not a bleeding heart, and that i am not afraid to seriously hurt anybody willing to enter my apartment using force. in fact, i'm likely to kill that person with my bare hands, rip out their heart with my teeth and shit on their remains.

you only think i'm exaggerating.

while i think that trump is probably right in deducing that promoting peace will make him more popular than beating the drums of war, i don't imagine that an american pullout from south korea is at all imminent.

see, here's the thing: when it was about war it was smoke & mirrors. and, when it's about peace, it will be smoke & mirrors, too.

i could be wrong; maybe, i missed something. but, the situation in korea is really pretty intractable. and, it would require a major shift in thinking from one or both sides to break through it.

that said, you don't need a peace agreement to increase trade, and that's what everybody should really be concerning itself with.

wynne wants to avoid saying "i will balance the budget".

but, she just as clearly wants to say very loudly that "doug ford will not balance the budget".

one of the things the liberals should be doing right now is trying to point out that doug ford isn't much of a conservative at all, with the hopes of promoting voter apathy.

we know he's going to run huge deficits. they should make sure everybody realizes this quite clearly.

and, see, there's a difference between being a liberal and pushing fiscal restraint, and being a liberal and pointing out that your opponent doesn't care about fiscal restraint.

liberals don't win elections by being conservatives. but, conservatives don't want to vote for fiscally irresponsible neo-liberals like doug ford, either - despite the fact that they keep getting tricked into it.

i mean, normally when we talk about the feds downloading services to the provinces, the provinces aren't volunteering for it.

when are you numbskulls going to ask for something costed?

and, we forget that what happened to mike harris is that he turned into stephen harper.

i guess this will help trudeau balance his budget?

it won't help ford balance his, that's for sure.

but, nobody really expects neo-liberals to balance budgets, do they? the federal conservatives have never balanced a budget.

c'mon, you dummies. you're being played. and bought off with your own cash, so this guy can sell off what's left of the commons to his banking buddies.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-pcs-announce-child-care-tax-rebate-for-low-income-families/

i really never saw myself as a smoker. i mean, i acknowledged i was. but, i never intended to start smoking habitually, and i was basically in the process of quitting from the time i realized i was.

i started smoking to stay awake because i was working and going to school at the same time. it was either nicotine or cocaine. i think i picked the better option.

and, it really does keep you awake and alert. it's the best stimulant there is. really.

so, how do you quit smoking when you have exams next week? you can't; you need to study, so you need to stay awake, so you need to smoke.

and, then how do you quit when you're working two jobs? or...

i would routinely quit for three-four weeks at a time, over and over again. so, it's really more accurate for me to say something like that i was a smoker around 70% of the time, between 2002-2016 - and a non-smoker about 30% of the time.

i never tried to rationalize it; i knew it was unhealthy, but i'd always quit next week. and, i was never happy about it, but i had to find some way to stay awake, whether i liked it or not.

whenever i had a down period, i'd get most of the way there. but, as soon as i had anything substantive to do, the smoking would start up again.

so, nobody should be surprised by how militant i'm being about this: even when i smoked, i was very anti-smoking, as weird as that sounds.

it follows that if you ever see me with a cigarette in my hand, you can be sure i'm either already drunk or on the way there.

if i end up going to court with this, all parties should expect an affidavit from me, declaring the following:

1) i finally definitively quit smoking cigarettes as a habit at the beginning of 2016, after smoking habitually from 2002-2016, with many attempts to quit over the period.
2) i have never been a habitual marijuana smoker.
3) i have never had a medical marijuana card.
4) as a rule, i have never smoked inside of any dwelling that i've inhabited; i've always smoked outside. i have not smoked anything - at all - inside of the apartment in question.
5) while i may have relapsed a couple of times due to overwhelming stress, including at the end of 2017, because quitting smoking is hard, those relapses have been short-lived and are not evidence of hidden habits. all relapses have been carried out exclusively outside of the dwelling in question.
6) i acknowledge that i may continue to smoke casually when i'm drinking, meaning when i'm at the bar. this is infrequent and likewise does not suggest habitual use - it is behaviour relegated strictly to bar patios and other places of alcohol consumption.

those are the facts.

you don't have to like them.

but please stop disputing them.

clearly, i crashed.

i need to get some work done today.

it's clear that she's still smoking inside, but less clear whether she's leaving or not. i woke up to an overhang of tobacco smoke, and have noticed some minor plumes. but, i continue to hear a lot of banging downstairs.

i guess if she's leaving then she'll want to be out by the first.

and, i'll wait until the first before i start making daily complaints. it's just going to be something like:

"yeah. she's still smoking. *click*."

again: you can't just order an addict to stop.

well, i'll acknowledge that this is a better approach than modelling for this election, as there is a potential for a large swing. but, i'll point out again that when you take a lot of crap and average it out, you're left with an average amount of crap.

i don't think the evidence that the pcs are polling over 40 right now is very strong.

what i want to point out, instead, is that this is the kind of headline the liberals would love to see replicated and picked up on. because the truth is that a lot of people are still voting against harris, rather than in favour of any specific liberal idea. these people are aging, though, too.

is there some value in the idea? i'm going to suggest that there is. harris was a brash neo-liberal that didn't give a fuck. ford is very much in the same mold.

the difference is that harris was still a tory, and was still able to hold a large amount of the old tory base. it took time for that to disintegrate, in revulsion at the shift towards markets (and just as a consequence of dying off). ford may do well amongst newer canadians, and that is a game changer, but he's going to have a harder time holding that red tory swing, which is still key in ontario for at least a little while longer. and, this is a cultural thing rather than a political thing - old tories are going to simply dislike him.

in the end, the election may depend on whether ford can hold his own party's traditional base or not, even as he makes large advances into traditional liberal voter territory. trump managed to do this. we'll see if ford can or not.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-ford-harris-1.4636845

unfortunately, when your apartment constantly smells like drugs and smoke, it's hard to see the value in things like laundry and showering because everything smells bad again in minutes, anyways.

i'm going to have to redo the last load i did.

but i'm coming up against my own stench, right now.

and i actually think that's a good sign - if i can smell myself over the background radiation.

i've been sitting here for hours, unsure if i'm going to fall asleep or not.

either i'll get to work or i'll fall asleep.

i think that when i do crash, i'll be happy to get something a little less broken.

the air is better tonight, but we'll see how long that lasts. i'm even considering showering...

all i've ever posted on the internet, when it comes to modern hardcore, is overly snotty reviews.

i actually don't have the slightest idea why anybody would think i've ever been a modern hardcore fan.

i don't, and never did, have any patience for that kind of thing.

i met some friends near the end of high school that knew i had a large cd collection. i didn't realize it for several years, but they thought i had hundreds of metal cds; in fact, i had hundreds of techno cds. well, industrial & techno.

warp records stuff. nettwerk records stuff. wax trax stuff. nin. thirlwell. coil. electronic pop, like bowie or oldfield. electronic post-rock, like tortoise. kraut/kosmische, like tangerine dream. keyboard-driven prog. goth. new wave.

the balance was mostly psychedelic music, itself often fairly electronic.

and, yeah, there were a few dozen punk discs from the 80s and 90s, as well.

i bought a late megadeath album on cassette once, but sold it within a few months. and, i flirted a little with korn, because they were weird.

but i never listened to, like, refused or anything like that. no "emo" (until the 2010s, when there was that brief moment of arty screamo). never liked that van halen, protest the hero kind of thing. was never my thing. i was listening to instrumental music at the time.

sorry.

exceptionally arrogant.

exceptionally greedy.

exceptionally isolated.

exceptionally doomed.

and, let me say this: any yankee who agrees with canada's position on pharmaceutical generic pricing should feel free to gather in their public squares, to voice their opinions in protests that are however violent they decide that they should be.

diversity of tactics.

we need a united front. the people need to stand united, across these borders, against corporate greed. when donald trump stands in collusion with the drug companies and attacks foreign countries for regulating their prices, everybody loses - on both sides of all borders. for, that is no doubt the true aim: to prevent americans from being able to afford the medications they need.

canada should wear it's inclusion on the yankee bullshit intellectual property watch list as a badge of honour.

the lyric sheet says otherwise, but i always heard "saigon!", and interpreted it as a prediction.

pulling out of syria is the right thing to do; i pointed it out here some time ago.

yes - russia is likely to gain the upper hand inside syria. but, that's inevitable. whatever objectives existed in 2011 are no longer meaningful.

the major objectives for america in the region need to be the following:

1) maintain and rebuild the turkish alliance.
2) minimizing iranian influence in the halls of power in turkey & iraq, rather than on the battlefield. you can't fight this war when every government in the region is against you. the way to contain iran right now is to rebuild bridges in iraq - and in turkey.
3) a reanalysis of russian capabilities, and an acceptance of the return of russian power.

at the end of the day, we might end up lucky that it isn't hillary clinton making these choices.

it's saigon all over again.

and, they can lose this war the easy way or the hard way.

ps: fuck "intellectual property".

all property is theft.

donald,

take your "american leadership" and shove it up your ass.

you are not a leader, you are a pirate.

and i'm not interested in your opinion.

regards,
the rest of the fucking world

this is outrageous.

the rest of the world should issue a joint statement denouncing america as a rogue state and telling it to fuck off and mind it's own business.

america has no right to deregulate drug prices outside it's borders; this is an absurd attack on our sovereignty, and should be met with the harshest response possible.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4172723/trump-administration-canada-intellectual-property/?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=Outbrain&utm_campaign=2015

i think that if i lived somewhere with an active abstract hip-hop scene, i'd take note of it.

it's not here. what's here is your prototypical sex, drugs & bad music.

i think i'd be more interested in the anticon stuff, and it's not outside the realm of plausibility that i may, one day, sit down and properly sort through it.

i've always had a distant admiration for public enemy.

but, i mean.

i'm a nice white kid from canada.

it's like listening to ethnic music from a different culture - which can be rewarding, but exists at arm's length.

so, i'm going to start listening to hip-hop eventually, right?

i need hip-hop to have a punk phase, first, is what i think.

see, i've said this repeatedly: if i was alive in the 60s, i would have hated rock music. i would have despised the rolling stones, looked down on the doors with utter contempt, pointed out that bob dylan wasn't actually a musician, argued the byrds and the velvets were boring...

i would have liked zappa, but he wasn't really a rock musician. and, i would have recognized the value in the the production team headed by george martin, rather than liked the actual beatles.

but, i would have actually been into jazz and classical music. where i reached into rock would have been through blues - so i would have appreciated hendrix as a blues guitarist. but, you'd have been more likely to find me at a john mclaughlin concert, or a philip glass opera or some early prog festival.

stated honestly and bluntly and tersely: i would have thought rock music was stupid, that rock musicians were depraved and that rock culture was nihilistic.

and, that's kind of what i think about hip-hop.

punk changed this narrative, by co-opting what was really a corporate brainwashing tool (they keep you doped on religion, and sex and tv - and rock 'n' roll, too) into a kind of agit-prop. and, that's what i can't find in hip-hop, and what i would need to get interested in it.

because i've also thought that jim morrison was a retard, and been far more interested in jello biafra.

maybe it's already happened and i missed it. but, i suspect that it's probably something that happens when hip-hop moves on, when the suits and dancers have gone on to the next thing, and all that's left are the nerds.

yeah, i got the regular estrace and paid the difference.

the physical is on monday.

the blood test will be some time next week.

and, we can talk about dosages and medication decisions when the results come back, in mid-may.

i could very well switch, in the end; this is just not the right time to play with this.

i'm apprehensive about this.

since i had my dosage increased a little over two years ago, i haven't felt as though my estrogen levels were low.

and, i feel that this should be measured empirically, rather than guessed at.

i will have a blood test this upcoming week; this is the wrong time for this experiment. it's just going to fuck up the test results.

so, i'm going to take the pills back and ask for the estrace, and then act as though i missed a dose.

wait.

this isn't a generic estrace, it's a hemihydrate.

the difference appears to be that the regular estrace needs to go through your liver, whereas the hemi-hydrate is just estrogen surrounded by water, and so absorbs on contact. but, if you take estrogen like this, you get a spike of estrogen and then a fall - which is likely to lead to mood swings. and, i kind of don't like the idea of taking estrogen like a drug. i want constant and stable levels, not to get high on hormones and then crash.

i know that i don't want to this through absorption - i want my liver to regulate it - but i don't know if it's going to be as effective, taken orally. logic kind of tells me that it's going to get ruined in my stomach, if it's just estrogen surrounded by water.

i have an appointment on monday...

but, let's see what i can learn about this in the short run.

hey, here's some good news - new ownership at the local shopper's has got my pills down in cost by ~25%.

they claim it's due to moving to generics.

here's the thing: i knew generics were less expensive the whole time, and i actually shopped around a few years ago, but everybody gave me the same price. the price went up a lot at one point at the beginning of 2016, and the answer i got had to do with the brand switching. i explicitly asked for generics, and they told me something about distributors. now, the pharmacist randomly switches me back to generics and is claiming he always had generics.

?

$20+/month over two years adds up to around $500. i should probably be kind of irked.

and, i know that the previous management didn't like the fact that she couldn't refuse me service, or set her own prices to get me out of the store. she seemed to be both religious + very pro-market. but, she bought a chain store in canada, inheriting two layers of strict rules. she really didn't have the right to discriminate against me, and nobody was going to let her do it - not even her employees.

i'm going to guess that they probably did run out of generics at some point two years ago, and they didn't switch me back when the generics came back in. the new management noticed the problem, and fixed it.

so, thanks. i guess.

i don't have an argument for a claim, because i received what i paid for. i don't think the store made anything from it - it was more about enforcing a value system than making a profit.

*shrug*.

let's just look forwards...

see, now it's after 2:00, so she's extra sure that mom & dad are asleep.

ugh.

like, she seems to have reacted to the situation this afternoon by turning the cure up really loud and going in her room and pouting.

as though she'd been grounded.

"it's not fair!" - with eyeliner picking up marijuana smoke, running amuck through kyoto song.

the thing is that she's like 45.

arrested development. entitlement. just a spoiled brat. call it what you will. but, it has to end soon, one way or another.

you're going to get arguments like "but it was after midnight" or "but it was after 4:00", like that matters - because, in her warped concept of logic, it actually does, because that's when her parents went to sleep and she could do what she wants.

this is what i'm dealing with, here.

there's no logic to it.

it's been mostly ok most of the night, but she seems to be smoking right now.

it's not exactly overwhelming. yet.

but, it demonstrates the problem, which is the addiction itself. she doesn't think she's doing anything wrong. so, she's going to push it and push it until we're back where we were. and, that's why i had to file to the board - she's just not interested in making the choice of complying.

she's like a 12 year old. really.

that said, i think i overheard her say she was moving in with her daughter.

that would be nice...

this is a positive step.

good.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/04/26/news/trudeau-government-says-canada-will-recover-billions-dollars-new-crackdown-oilpatch

how about this for an attack ad?

"with his support for free market reforms, and his insistence on keeping our children ignorant of their own sexuality, doug ford will turn ontario's economy into that of mexico's - and our schools into muslim madrassas.

want to live like muslims in mexico? then vote for doug ford."

everything we can be taught about humans through the medium of film is either written somewhere in shakespeare, or written in an ancient greek tragedy.

we just need to throw off these victorian shackles to see it.

because we can't forget about ann coulter - or ayn rand, for that matter.

but, this is actually missing the point. destroying the hero isn't and shouldn't be a gendered or racialized activity - we should destroy all heroes, and instead learn to live for ourselves, based on our own ideals and visions.

i'm sorry to be the old nerd, here. but, this is why shakespeare has such a central place in our culture: his heroes always have flaws, and those flaws always lead to tragedy in the end.

we live such sheltered existences, today. but, taking a step away from the disney stories and fairy tales is really about reclaiming our humanity. we don't need a radical revolution to do this: it's sitting in our curriculums. we just need to rekindle it.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/29/how-wonder-woman-and-the-last-jedi-could-make-our-politics-worse.html

so, to recap.

ford is not a vote for the past, but a vote for the new world order as jason kenney imagined it - a world of interfaith prayer services and religiously motivated government as an opiate for the masses, to allow the banking class to sell the province off. he's a walking imf restructuring program, and by the time he's done we'll end up like sri lanka. or maybe mexico. it's the next step in the race to the bottom...

wynne is a vote for the broken multicultural model, not as initially envisioned by pearson and trudeau but as broken by mulroney and harper. it's less that this is intentional; the point is that she's still imagining the ideals of a pearson, while attaching them to the policies of a harper, and can't see through these contradictions. she thinks you can just put an openly trans person in the same room as an imam and have them find some common cause, rather than dealing with the reality of them wanting to kill each other.

but, horwath is truly a vote for ontario's past - the publicly held resources, the strong union jobs, the dominant manufacturing sector. she may be substituting in government for lost benefits, and that's a step forward really, anyways. but, she alone has a vision to return the province to what it was, rather than to push it forward into some unknown. she's the actual conservative in the race.

i'm not going to vote on immigration policy. it's a federal responsibility. and, my preferred option is to see the feds return to policies that allow us to return to the vision of pearson, as well as some government policies to undermine the role of religious institutions in daily lives. i want these migrant groups to join the growing atheist consensus, and stop fighting it. but, if you do want to vote on immigration, these are the actual choices as they are.

and, it makes it clear why ford is not trump and why running against him as though he is will lead to certain defeat: the liberals don't need to find a way to hold wandering white voters, they need to find a way to stop their immigrant base from aligning with their actual values.

the exact problem is that they've come to embrace religious pluralism as a collection of trivial differences, and the exact reason they got to this point is that they're a lot of smug, upper class atheists that refuse to take the threat of religion seriously.

now, we have a developing problem with the return to a religious society, which is in a direct conflict path with the total collapse of religion in the native-born population.

and, this is going to be the political spectrum of the future: white atheists with liberal perspectives vs brown theists with conservative ones.

of course, i'm not suggesting mutual exclusion. but, that's going to be the basic division. and, it's going to be racial and cultural because the brown theists will insist that it must be, as the white atheists insist that it can't be.

the new political axis is science v faith.

and neither side wants to bridge that gap and get along.

what's actually happening to the liberals is that the muslims don't like them because theu're pro-gay, and the gays are uneasy about them being pro-muslim, and the jews don't like them being pro-muslim, and the muslims don't like them being pro-jewish and..

rather than have everybody working together, everybody is turning on them.

because you can't just imagine radical inclusion without undoing the ignorance that prevents it.

that's magical thinking - it's not reason.

you can't be pro-religion and pro-equality at the same time, and everybody knows that except the politicians in the liberal party.

that doesn't make wynne the maga candidate; wynne is really living in a fantasy reality, a projection of what was supposed to happen with increased immigration, but didn't. so, she ties together racism and "islamophobia" and homophobia as something to build a united front against, without realizing that the most homophobic members in society are racial minorities, the most anti-islamic groups are recent immigrants from asia and the most racist groups are religious fundamentalists. it's an incoherent worldview that belongs to the 1990s.

the "make ontario great again" candidate is neither doug ford nor kathleen wynne, ir's andrea horwath.

doug ford couldn't have won a city council seat in this country forty years ago.

do not blame this on his father.

the pearson system was a model, ideal.

the system began to decay with mulroney.

ford's chances this cycle are a direct consequence of the changes in demographics that occurred in this country under the previous conservative government.

and, that's why he's some kind of anti-trump, rather than some kind of mini-trump: what he really represents is the collapse of ontario into a third world society, where conservative social values run rampant through an ignorant population and thieves at the top make off like bandits.

and, the only demographic chance of beating him back is if white voters find a way to unite against him to uphold the secular values that we're in danger of losing.

but, it's the feds that need to learn this lesson to save the country from ruin.

and, if the federal liberals don't find a way to reverse kenney's policies, they're going to need to get used to be being by these interfaith coalitions that want to bring us back to the dark ages.

if ford wins this election, his first thank you call should be to jason kenney.

when exactly did the supreme court rule in favour of the government's right to pipeline expansion?

how do governments even have rights?

more incoherent nonsense from the tory media.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-trudeaus-student-grant-kerfuffle-is-the-latest-act-that-could/

kathleen wynne would be better off in a back room as a policy wonk.

she's an awful politician.

donald trump did quite well with indian-american immigrants, as well.

ford is actually exactly the kind of candidate that the indian community wants: staunchly pro-market, opposed to any kind of state regulation, clearly not gay and with a bit of a macho streak. and, he's male. that's key. these groups tend to retain attachments to traditional conservative value systems, are very pro-family and lean libertarian on economic policy.

and, they don't like muslims.

at all.

liberals need to come to turn with the reality that they're out of touch with immigrant communities in this country, who have absolutely no attachment to their insular white delusions of multiculturalism, and that it's going to cost them dearly at the ballot box.

what wynne represents is what out of touch white people think brown people want; she doesn't remotely represent what brown people actually want.

tanya granic allen's riding has a south indian plurality, and they are the most anti-muslim group out there. that said, she may have difficulty gaining traction in this riding, as her message would be most popular in a riding with a larger muslim majority.

it is, of course, the muslim groups that are most vocal in opposition to her sex-ed policies - and wynne should expect to lose muslims in this election, given that her policies are unpopular amongst them, and her opponent is popular amongst them.

this is another tactical mistake; she should have allowed an open nomination in this riding.

what i'm realizing this cycle, is that i agree with 90% of wynne's policies, but disagree with 90% of her tactics.

https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2018/04/26/premier-surprised-controversial-pc-candidate-tanya-granic-allen-is-running-for-any-party-in-2018.html

you can't just tell a drug addict to stop doing drugs.

that's not how this works.

i woke up to a bit of a curveball.

the property manager showed up a little after 11:00, and handed me a new set of building regulations.

- no smoking
- no drugs

hrmmn.

everybody in this building smokes pot. this was never my intent, but i guess the owner had to buckle.

if the other tenants are upset about the universal application of the rules, they should blame her, and not me. i only care about my own unit. she's the one that cried that it's not fair. it's her fault.

that said, these rules are not enforceable, and i don't have any faith in these tenants to obey them - or in management to enforce them. they're just going to spend a lot on legal costs, with no end point.

she's smoking right now.

so, i mailed the t2 & t6 this morning.

and, i have a letter for the property manager., as well.

Update on the Situation in Unit 15

A T2 and T6 were completed on the evening of April 25th, 2018, with intent to process them on April 26th.

On the morning of April 26th, before these documents were processed, Ina appeared at my door with a new list of rules, including a no-smoking rule and a no drugs policy.

I do not have faith in the tenant to abide by these rules, and I do not have faith in the management to enforce them. My last smoke complaint was met by a request for me to move, so I don’t expect anything different in the future. And, as I am typing this, I can smell marijuana wafting into the unit from downstairs.

So, the documents were processed on the afternoon of April 26th, despite the existence of the new rules. Should the situation improve, to my surprise, by the time of the court appearance, I will cancel the court date. I would actually prefer not to move, I just can’t stay in an unhealthy unit. Be advised that I can always reapply for an end to the tenancy, with proper compensation.

Despite Ina’s claims, there was no law passed in Ontario restricting smoking indoors. There was in fact a law passed in Ontario restricting the outdoor use of cannabis. I do not think that Ina was confused, I think she was being dishonest. My legal opinion is that an action against the tenant below me would be unsuccessful, given the current legal realities. The legal reality in Ontario is that it is the ownership’s responsibility to renovate the unit, or compensate me for moving costs and damages. I did not write these laws, and do not like them much, but they are as they are.

In the mean time, I am making the following requests for renovations in the unit. There will be further requests made as the tape is fully removed.

Bedroom

When I moved into this unit, the bedroom had cracks in the wall. This was presented to management in writing, and I took pictures, as well. I eventually noticed smoke seeping in the cracks. As I did not want to be a nuisance tenant, I hoped that covering the cracks with tape would keep the smoke out. This was actually partially successful. However, management has asked me to remove the tape. I believe it is reasonable to request that the holes be patched, in exchange for removing the tape.

I have left a tarp over the water closet in the short term, until a proper discussion can be had on how to fix the water closet.

I also acknowledge that the baseboards will need to be repainted, but, as a tenant, I don’t care much about this. I would, however, advise management to contemplate the wisdom in seeking legal action over $5 worth of paint, considering that they are unlikely to even win the case at all. It would be a better idea to just paint the baseboards.

I will at least apologize for the inconvenience, but would request that you in turn realize the desperation underlying it.

Door Frame

While the seal on the new doors is in fact quite impressive, the frame was never completed properly. In an attempt to be a quiet tenant, I simply taped around the frame. This was reasonably effective. As per the request of management, I have removed this tape, but feel it is reasonable to ask for the management to compensate by caulking the door frame. This is actually a simple request to finish a job that was never really finished.

Once these issues are dealt with, similar small requests will be made on the other side of the unit.

like, i've had women sit on my lap at parties while i'm in the middle of a conversation, and have had to carefully squeeze out of it to finish the conversation, to the confusion of everybody.

i'm going to want to talk to you until the sun comes up before we do any lap-sitting.

but, this seems to be considered old-fashioned or boring or something.

i think the reason i'd prefer an older woman is because it's going to be more of an intellectual thing than a physical thing.

and i think the reason i'd prefer a younger dude is because it's going to be more of a physical thing than an emotional one.

i mean, if i wanted to hang out and chum around with hot guys, i'd just be gay. i don't really enjoy the company of men at all. but i am physically attracted to them...

on the other hand, while i prefer the company of women, i don't get nearly as aroused by them.

i continue to get more attention from women than men, which is...

i can't pretend i understand, but what can i do about this?

i get chased around, from time to time, mostly by younger girls that don't fully realize how old i am and think they can convert me or something. they tend to have drastically inaccurate perceptions of me. i know better than to get caught up in something like this. and, they give up after a little while, when they realize i'm not into it. i get the impression that they tend to conclude that i'm some kind of idiot for not going for them, and maybe they're right, who knows? it doesn't seem to cross their mind that i'm more into guys.

and, i've got the eye of a few guys as well - mostly older for some reason. i get the impression that they tend to conclude i'm not much of a girl, after all - because i'd clearly melt for them if i was. if i can resist them, i must be a dude, right? right...

i'd be more likely to go for older women and younger guys.

but, the point is that i get plenty of opportunity. both ways.

i'm just not into it. and especially not casually.

i don't want to stand here at 37 and claim i'll never have sex again, but i'm going to have to get to know somebody for a while, first, and my lifestyle doesn't currently suggest that this is very likely to ever happen.

a one-night stand, for me, is something that is really out of the question.

if you're curious.

i masturbate like once a month, if that. like, when i have to, kind of thing.

and i don't ejaculate when i orgasm.

because i'm on testosterone suppressors that suppress the production of semen.

i repeat: i am biologically incapable of producing semen.

again: i'm not into some kind of self-hating ascetic.

i just find hedonism to be boring.

fwiw, i'm absolutely willingly celibate.

maybe it's the gender dysphoria, but i find that sex is boring as fuck.

thirteen years, and i don't feel like i'm missing out on a thing.

i'd rather get drunk than get laid.

sorry.

so, i have a t2 and a t6 filled out.

i am requesting:
$1000 - moving costs
$1000 - bed
$1000 - couch
$500 - dry cleaning & laundry
$200 - tape & tarps
$100 - cleaning supplies
============
$3800 + a tbd percentage of rent paid, which will be $5600.

at 25%, that will be over $5000.

they will also no doubt hire lawyers.

the law is an ass, here. but, hopefully the court will make renting to inside smokers quite expensive, and hopefully that will create some pressure to put some more reasonable laws in place.

nobody should be allowed to smoke inside, ever. ten feet from the house should be the law....

i'm going to repeat this: the liberals should be running on their record in government.

they've made a lot of accomplishments.

and, they've put things in motion that i'd like to see come to their conclusions.

conservatives can whine and moan about conservative things, but i don't care about any of these things, because i'm not a conservative.

i just want to be clear.

it's not going to be the thing that determines my vote.

but, i'm certainly not opposed to raising corporate tax rates to eliminate the deficit. it's better than cutting services to do it, anyways.

a provincial level of government is different than a federal level of government, because it can't print money. so, ontario will in fact have to pay it's debt off, eventually.

but, the thing is that the only actual consequence of running a large public debt is in investors ratings, and these are political, anyways. i guess, in that sense, it makes sense for the ndp to try and avoid giving moody's anything to play with...

but, i need to reiterate that i'm more likely to get skittish about the ndp if they make the debt the focus of their campaign than applaud them for "being responsible". despite the public misperception, the ndp has a history of cutting services to pay off the debt - they are the party with the most fiscally conservative track record. corporate tax rates don't raise very often. if horwath insists on broadcasting an obsession with lowering public debt, i'm going to interpret it as broadcasting an intent to cut services, regardless of the platform. at the end of the day, that's the most likely thing that happens.

we live in a reality where politicians campaign on one thing and do another. this is one of those scenarios where you need to look in between the lines. the ontario liberals have a good track record on this - and that's what i think they should be running on, their record. the ndp, less so. frankly.

those are the empirical facts.

so, horwath needs to be careful.

if we're going to elect new democrats and get conservatives anyways, i'd rather split the vote.

i'm still hurting, but i'm going to try to start.

is this even possible?

well, i know what it feels like to be high, and i know that the smoke is getting me high. i'm not guessing that maybe i'm this mysterious thing called "being high". i'm identifying something i know very well.

i think that the basic idea here is correct: it's hard for second-hand smoke to get you high.

what are the facts, here?

1) this building has no "ventilation system". my windows are wide open when they can be, which is not always. hers are shut. it's certainly not a "hot box", but the smoke is only exiting one direction, and it is up. the winds tend to blow around the building rather than into it.
2) the floors basically aren't there. so, it's like i'm sitting in an open concept above her, directly in her exhale path. sometimes, it's like she's blowing it in my face.
3) i have a very, very low tolerance to marijuana. it appears to be unusually low. i also know this from experience.
4) she has a very high tolerance.
5) she smokes very potent marijuana. it appears to be very high cbd, very low thc. i actually think that the terpene stuff is bullshit. but, this is the kind of pot that knocks you out for days, without really getting you "high".
6) she smokes very big joints, and smokes them frequently.

all of these factors are going to play into this. and, all i can say is i know what i'm feeling, and it's pretty real. this is the experiment, and these are the results i'm reporting. somebody else may have different experiences, due to a higher tolerance....

....but i'm perfectly comfortable with stating that i'm getting knocked out by a high volume of high potency marijuana, even in a relatively open space, but i recognize that it depends on whether i get into contact with what i call a "plume" or not.

i'm not watching her from downstairs, but a "plume" probably happens when she takes a hard three or four hit toke on one of these huge joints. when that happens, i'm getting the smoke burned off the joint (which is substantial), the smoke missed in the toke and the exhaled smoke. what i'm getting at is that the way she smokes is very wasteful, and i'm actually getting a lot of uninhaled marijuana as a result of it.

the smell itself is not going to do it. i have to walk into one of these plumes. and, because she seems to be smoking near my bed [both before and after i moved my bed], that is exactly what is happening, repeatedly.

https://www.livescience.com/50880-secondhand-marijuana-smoke-effects-drug-test.html

"how's the pot in windsor?"

it's terrible.

my eyes are still burning, but i'm going to get a start on this. i'm not sure if i'll get it mailed today, but, if i don't i should get it mailed right away in the morning.

nope.

knocked out, again.

around 6:00.

this stuff is very, very powerful, but it's not any fun to get a headache and pass out. no euphoria. no buzz. no "high". just overwhelming lethargy, and a really nasty throb in the head.

i might actually recommend actual marijuana to get rid of this.

i can't write like this.

well, that gets me through dec of 2015, anyways.

i have a headache. again.

i'm going to get something to eat and hope it wakes me up a little and then get to writing that essay, with the full intent to mail it today. i've always tended to avoid doing school work when stoned (drugs and school don't go well together, kids), so i might have to wait for the influence to wear off a little, first.

i'm going to enter this journal into evidence, so i'll be posting detailed accounts of when the second hand smoke has an effect on me.

season 2 ends about a week into january, and the music blog is going to be updating sporadically afterwards. that should actually speed me up quite a bit.

"we spent the night playing video games and doing drugs, and then walking around talking about tv shows. 

you missed out."

thankfully, i have some coffee.

because that's the drug i like.

coffee.

i'm once again feeling tired and miserable in the wee hours of the morning.

the strangest thing is that they're just wasting their drugs.

throw a dart and you'll hit somebody that wants this.

why harass the one that doesn't?

i moved here hoping to meet people that wanted to start a new society in the ruins of the old one.

unfortunately, this place is full of people that perfectly represent that society's decay.

i don't like the junkies; it's the junkies that like me.

but, i really don't like them.

at all.

i don't want anything to do with these people that are showing up here every morning and doing drugs.

the only people i was able to build friendships with after high school were the anarchists at occupy.

those are literally the only friends i've met since i was 20.

why can't i have adults show up at my door and talk about revolutionizing the means of production, rather than children show up smoking drugs?

i'm actually looking forward to turning 40, so i can say it.

thirty-something isn't scary.

but, they leave you alone when you tell them you're 40.

so, i do - but i'm lying.

it'll be nice when it's actually true...

they see me as a peer, but my interest in twenty-somethings is non-existent. i see them as children.

there's this mother/daughter pair that lives in the building, in separate units. i guess the kid grew up here.

the kid keeps visibly checking me out.

i'm closer to her mother's age.

something like a smashing pumpkins reunion is....

if it's, like, the only thing to do that month, and i need to get out of the house, maybe.

but, it's probably going to cost too much, and it's probably going to be in a venue that is too big to get anything from, and i'd probably have a better night listening to the records at home.

i never saw the pumpkins live. i had an opportunity in....i think it was 2000....but i'd grown out of arena rock shows at that time, and just didn't think it would be a good night.

they apparently lost power that night, and people told me after the fact that i was right. but it's not the point.

i think rock music loses it's power when the venue gets over 2500 people. i'm just not into the festival thing. it just doesn't appeal to me, much.

there's the odd exception that i've made, mostly for acts that strike me as specifically arena rock bands, and i'm a bit more lenient about open air festivals, but i tend to hold to it.

i know i'm never going to get to see the pumpkins in a club, but i also know i wouldn't enjoy it in a bigger context.

she's in support of a constitutional amendment to restrict access to abortion, so the supreme court argument doesn't really hold up, either.

a little better, maybe.

not substantively... 

and i could go through this.

in fact, i will go through this as i rebuild 2016.

i mean, you'll recall that clinton argued that children crossing the border illegally should be deported "to send central america a message".

that's not substantively different than trump's position.

she was also heavily criticized during the primaries for openly racist statements in her past.

clinton was a terrible candidate.

and, every time you try and blame her loss on sexism, you just look stupid.

the dominant voting block that cost clinton the election was married white women.

in case there is some confusion, let me be clear.

i could not have voted in the last american election.

but, my heart was with jill stein, and my brain was with hillary clinton - as a lesser evil choice.

barely.

so, i made the argument that you should vote for clinton to beat trump. but, this was intellectual.

the truth is that i probably wouldn't have voted at all.

stein made the argument that it really wasn't clear that clinton was a lesser evil, and i think that she was right on that point. she may have been a lesser evil on the environment, which would have been my dominant voting concern. it is not clear that she was a lesser evil on the economy, and she was probably a greater evil on foreign policy.

i'm ultimately of the view that trump has not demonstrated much policy that is substantively different than clinton's - i'm not sure that clinton would have been much different.

we'll see, in the end, what kind of major policy initiatives come out of trump's presidency. as of now, he's really been a caretaker president.

this is such a weird map.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ontario_Provincial_Election_1990_-_Results_Map.svg

if doug ford gets ~38% - a number roughly in sync with donald trump's approval rating - do you think he should get the keys to the government?

i don't.

i'm in support of a coalition government, even if it only lasts long enough to prevent ford from taking power.

and, he's going to have to poll at roughly 45% to prevent that coalition from forming - which i think is very unlikely.

i need to reiterate: i have not seen any reliable polling that indicates that ford is beyond minority territory.

i am still expecting a coalition government as the most likely outcome.

but, key constituencies are starting to turn in irrational ways - indicating that this might be becoming one of those random expressions of mass stupidity that is inevitable in any democracy.

not only is doug ford unlikely to spend money on more infrastructure, he's very likely to sell a good percentage of it.

perhaps what the unions are really more interested in is a tax cut.

i've had these discussions; workers don't tend to understand economics very well, and tend to get their information from very bad sources. they're consequently easy to take advantage of with what are essentially appeals to ignorance.

they believe in trickle-down economics. no; stop. they really do.

i will not be surprised if unions vote for ford. but, i'll be disappointed in the stupidity of it.

unions + immigrants is a winning coalition. it's a familiar one, too, isn't it?

the left needs some serious reflection, from pseudo to literal.

i'm not sure why anybody would think that doug ford cares about infrastructure.

that sounds like fake news, to me.

leave it to alberta to be the only jurisdiction in the world that is dumb enough to buy into elon musk's bullshit.

i just took a walk downstairs to investigate the banging, and i caught her leaving in a waiting car, which is not conclusive.

she's obviously not going outside to smoke, because she's smoking inside - and she's already had a few.

so, i'm actually left with one of two conclusions: either she left for work a little late tonight or she's slowly moving things out.

if the smoke continues over night, and right now it seems like it's going to, i'm actually going to have to conclude that she's in the process of moving and question the property manager about it tomorrow before i mail the documents.

i don't know if having her move is good enough, any more. i know it's worth giving it another try, though. it's the easiest answer...

i could, of course, cancel the court process, as well.

unfortunately, she appears to be home tonight.

but, i'm wondering if she misread the n5.

i'm not getting an honest response from management; they're playing stupid about it. but, that's just it - they're just bluffing on everything. i can read. to the contrary, this woman is obviously not very bright.

when i made the second smoke complaint, it was after ten days. now, the n5 can be confusing, if you're already stupid to begin with, and this is what i meant when i pointed out that the property management was feigning incompetency.

the first n5 is just a warning. it says knock it off in the next ten days, or i'm going to try and evict you. now, it also comes with a date on it, but the date is really meant for the second n5, not the first one.

my n5 had the date of april 23rd on it, but it wasn't a meaningful date. it was either included out of incompetency, or out of an attempt to frighten me.

a stupid or ignorant person could get the notice and conclude that they have to move by the 23rd. and, if that is the case, i would expect that this woman would actually be moving out over the week.

that might explain why she's not working, and also why i'm hearing a lot of banging.

so, should i wait this out, or what?

when i called in on day 11, i got the (i think feigned) confused reaction from management, indicating they were holding to it. but, i know better.

does she?

hrmmn.